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State's scales tipping more toward accuracy

Increased resources and inspections yield better compliance rates

Chad Bontrager, deputy secretary of agriculture, said the department will continue to work with scale owners and service companies to improve compliance. Changes in leadership, resources and scrutiny have yielded more accurate scales, according to state data.

Chad Bontrager, deputy secretary of agriculture, said the department will continue to work with scale owners and service companies to improve compliance. Changes in leadership, resources and scrutiny have yielded more accurate scales, according to state data.

State inspection data shows the accuracy of heavy capacity scales in Kansas is improving after a year of new leadership, increased resources and more scrutiny.

The scales underpin the Kansas agriculture economy and are used to weigh millions of dollars of goods every year.

In the first half of fiscal year 2013, the state's inspectors approved just 26 percent of the large scales they tested. Almost 50 percent of those tested were found to not weigh accurately enough, while others failed to adhere to state specifications.

The numbers improved in fiscal year 2014, which ended in July. Inspectors approved 45 percent of the heavy capacity scales they checked and only 27 percent were found "out of tolerance" or not weighing accurately enough.

"Certainly we want that to be better in the future but I think we're making progress there," Kansas Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Chad Bontrager said.

The Department of Agriculture's Division of Weights and Measures is charged with ensuring the accuracy of weighing devices used to buy and sell goods, including gas pumps, small grocery store scales and approximately 4,000 heavy capacity scales used to weigh truckloads of scrap metal, recyclables and agricultural products.

For almost 30 years, the department has used a unique, semi-privatized system in which it licenses technicians from private scale service companies to inspect commercial scales while a few state inspectors spot-check a fraction of the private work.

The system remains, but a number of changes have happened in the almost two years since Joe Hamilton, a scale service company owner, complained that lax state regulation was compromising scale accuracy and putting conscientious companies at a competitive disadvantage.

Bontrager was promoted in July 2013 to oversee several Agriculture divisions, including Weights and Measures. The head of Weights and Measures, Tim Tyson, was later replaced by current program manager Doug Musick. Maureen Henzler, a former inspector, is now administrator for the scales program.

Henzler was one of three state inspectors during FY 2013. Gov. Sam Brownback requested a $430,000 appropriation to hire four more this year. The Legislature only approved about $270,000, but Bontrager said the department is making it work.

"Having those folks out there working with scale service companies and scale owners will continue to drive those accuracy numbers up," Bontrager said.

The state had four inspectors working by the time FY 2014 ended in July and is looking for a fifth. The four examined 265 scales, a pace significantly higher than the previous year, and approved 119 of them. They rejected 71 for not meeting the state's accuracy standards, including three that state inspectors found out of tolerance twice within months.

"One of the things that I'm excited about with the additional funding and having more inspectors in the field is we should be able to reduce the time between our initial inspection and the followup," Bontrager said. "It's probably no secret to scale owners today that the state doesn't come very often."

In most cases, when a scale is out of tolerance, the owner is given 10-30 days to continue using the scale and bring in a service company to recalibrate it. But the data also shows that, in the past year, inspectors have become more willing to take scales out of service on site, doing so six times.

"It's pretty rare that we do that," Bontrager said. "But if it's far enough out of tolerance, that's really the main reason."

While the accuracy figures have improved, the data also shows a slight jump in the number of scales that state inspectors found hadn’t been tested by any service company within the past 365 days, as required by state law.

"I'm not surprised by that," Bontrager said. "We've heard from service companies that for whatever reason they're running into more of that, as well."

Bontrager said the department will continue to work with scale owners, producers and technicians to improve compliance. Officials also are continuing to evaluate a number of changes proposed under Tyson, including limiting the number of retakes on the state's licensing test, posting company compliance rates online and formalizing a tiered penalty system for failed state inspections.

Bontrager said a request for bids to administer and score a new licensing test was just closed, and he and colleagues will re-evaluate the need to limit retakes after the contractor takes over.

He said the department currently is distributing quarterly compliance reports to the service companies themselves and the motivation to post them publicly will hinge on whether accuracy continues to improve.

The formal penalty matrix, though, is still in the works, and Bontrager said he expects it to be ready soon.